[ummonk]

> might as well argue that a plane isn’t a real bird or a car isn’t a real horse.

They aren’t though… They are far superior at specific things birds and horses are known for, but they can’t do everything that birds and horses can, so they aren’t even artificial birds and horses.

[famouswaffles]

Of course they aren't. The point is that it's irrelevant. what matters is that the plane still flies, the car still drives and the boat still sails.

For the people who are now salivating at their potential, or dreading the possibility of being made redundant by them, these large language models are already intelligent enough to matter.

Handwringing bout some non-existent difference between "true understanding" and "fake understanding" which by the way nobody seems to be able to actually distinguish (I mean wow such a supposed huge difference and you can't even show me what that is. a distinction you can't test for is not a distinction ) is so far beyond the point, it's increasingly maddening to read.

[ummonk]

Okay I agree with you on that. The technology will be disruptive regardless of whether we attribute true understanding to it, and as we start adding long term memory and planning to these AIs, we will start seeing significant alignment risk as well. This is true regardless of whether we decide to cope by saying they have "fake understanding" and are "stochastic parrots".